Friday, September 11, 2015

Anishinaabe Akiing

“the land to which
the people belong”

(As
the dominant culture I am trapped in hurtles toward extinction, I seek comfort
by searching for signs of the Pre-Contact Sacred Cultural Landscape just below
the surface of the modern coat of whitewash and feel the sense of loss entwined
in a sense of wonder, wandering along rows of stones that just might be
representations of Great Serpents, that just might be Indigenous Peoples
prayers to the Beings that bring rain, protect the things that grow, renew the
world with cleansing fires and ensure the survival of all the Beings on the land to which those People also once belonged, once
all interconnected, now chopped up, sub-dived and mortgaged, little boxes like
little prisons, linked together by roads and wires delivering electricity and
coded information, yet still separated and starving for the Great Spirit Mystery, made of
star stuff that asks for nothing and everything at the same time. Stone Turtles
here and there, Bears and spirit faces, Birds and diamonds, shining white
stones, red ones, black ones, yellow ones …)

Winona
LaDuke (Anishinaabe): “We have a lot of teachings and language
about how a people can live a thousand years in the same place and not destroy
things. The phrase anishinaabe akiing, for example, means the land to which the
people belong. It’s not the same thing as private property or even common
property. It has to do with a relationship that a people has to a place—a
relationship that reaffirms the sacredness of that place.

All our places are
named.
Near Thunder Bay, Ontario, is “The Place Where the Thunder Beings Rested on
their Way from West to East.” We go there to do vision quests, to
reaffirm our relationship with that power, and to offer our gifts to the
thunder beings and the part they played in our creation. That place, and the
places where our people stopped on their migration—all these places are
named—and they have a resonance with us.

In
all our teachings we understand that all
the creatures are our relatives, whether they are muskrats or
cranes—whether they have fins or wings or paws or feet. And in our covenant
with the Creator, we understand that it is not about managing their
behavior—it’s about managing ours, because we’re the ones who cause extinction
of species. We’re the youngest species, and we don’t necessarily have the most
smarts. We’ve bungled up along the way, and we acknowledge these mistakes in
our stories and in our history as Indian people. The question is whether you
have the humility and the commitment to get some learning out of these
experiences…

That
place known as The Place Where the Thunder Beings Rest isn’t called that now.
It’s now called Mt. McKay. I don’t have a problem with Mr. McKay, but I do have
a problem with this practice of naming large mountains after small men. How
could we name something as immortal as a mountain after something as mortal as
a human?

This
could be fixed. Just look at Ayers Rock in Australia. It’s called Uluru now, because
that’s its traditional name. Mt. McKinley in Alaska is now called Denali. The
country of Rhodesia is now called Zimbabwe. It’s not disastrous to rename.

The
anthropologists used to come out and watch us manoominike—harvest the rice. After we rice in the morning, we
bring our rice in and let it dry. We parch it over a fire, and we dance on it
to get the hulls off, and then winnow it in a basket. We pretty much do the
same thing today using wood fires as we’ve always done—we’re an intermediate
technology people…

This dam of rocks was created to increase water levels in the lake in order to more easily harvest wild rice.

Ojibwe
is a language of 8,000 verbs. The word for “work” is a strange construct for
us. It doesn’t mean we aren’t a hard-working people, but in our language, the
word is anokii, which means that
whether you are fishing or weaving a basket, what you are doing is living—which
is not the same thing as being paid a wage to do something.

After
the harvest, we have a big feast, and we dance and tell stories. The
anthropologists watched us, and they didn’t like that. They said we would never become civilized because we
enjoyed our harvest too much. We did too much dancing, too much singing…”